Enoch

I wonder if Bethesda's weak VO history has anything to do with their location. Fallout 3's credits list the following voice recording locations: "Bethesda Game Studios [Rockville MD], Absolute Pitch Studios [bethesda MD], The Audio Department [New York NY], Morris Creative Services [boston MA], North Hollywood Sound [North Hollywood CA], Levels [Hollywood CA], Juice [santa Monica CA]." I wouldn't be surprised if the non-MD locations were just to pick up their top talent (Neeson lives in NY; Perlman lives in LA), with minor roles done locally on the cheap. (Sidenote: the abovementioned Absolute Pitch Studios is located only a block away from one of my favorite restaurants. And only about 1.5 miles from my house.) Obsidian, of course, has the benefit of having the best concentration of voice-actors in the world right in their backyard in SoCal. Bethsoft isn't going to get close to that anywhere within a reasonable drive of Rockville, MD. Clearly, other non-LA studios (not least, Bioware) have hired top talent (read: LA-based talent) in the past, but it takes some investment to do so.

Week in Maui & Kauai = Good. Leaving a day late for said trip due to blizzard = Bad. Day-later flight delayed, causing a missed connection and an unplanned night in San Francisco = Bad. Actual time spent on the islands = Very Good. Red-eye flight back to the Eastern U.S. = Very Bad.

The late-game dialogue checks are... weird. My Jerk/Sap meter is as follows:

I didn't hate completely the subway tunnels, but that's mostly because they nailed the look of the actual DC Metro, which I take to work everyday. But, yeah, if you didn't use fast travel and took them every time you needed to get to a downtown location, they would get old extremely fast.

By the way, someone should fix the link in this forum. Click on "Fallout: New Vegas" here, and the link still goes to Bethsoft's general Fallout discussion area, rather than the new F:NV-specific forum.

My Sentinel is pretty simple, and I can't imagine setting one up particularly different: 2 ranks of Throw 4 ranks of Warp 4 ranks of Tech Armor 4 ranks of Overload 0 ranks of Cryo Blast 4 ranks of the passive skill Remaining points into AP Ammo. (Warp ammo might be a better choice, but I haven't done Jack's mission yet.) I played around with Reave as the bonus skill (moving all my points from Warp to Reave) for a while, and I do think that it's a more useful ability, but it still is 80% similar to Warp, and thus not the best use of the bonus skill spot. Also, the ammo powers are effective even with a minimal investment (1 rank of AP ammo = +30% gun damage to armor and health). Anyhow, I really don't see much room for any different-but-equally-effective builds. I guess one could max out Throw or Cryo Blast for crowd-control of un-armored/shielded/barriered enemies, but such a build would be relatively less effective in most fights. A different bonus skill like Slam or Neural Shock might make for marginal tactical changes, too. But really, I think that all Sentinels are going to play pretty much the same way once they're past the first few levels.

Yeah, in hindsight, it's probably too obvious to mention. From ME1, though, I somehow got a Roma/Gypsy parallel stuck in my head (probably based on Tali's accent), that wasn't really dislodged until I did her loyalty quest in ME2 and the Geth/Golem parallel hit me.

Bioware's inspiration for the Quarians. (Language cues, wandering themes, the questions of whether to violently retake the homeland from a seemingly-alien foe, and even the Geth origin is pretty much a retelling of the Golem story.)

There's a lot of federally-owned land, but it's so empty that it's where the government was actually testing its own atomic bombs in the '40s and '50s. Nellis Air Force base is a significant outfit near Vegas, but that's the only one I know of.

He's probably not allowed to comment on it either way-- regardless of whether it's right, wrong, or yet-to-be-determined.

That's not entirely accurate.... ...except for the "learned a lot" part. But I digress. Fair enough-- I clearly have no inside information about how the development actually went. My core point was simply that Obsidz dealing with a tight schedule back in '04 probably taught them some lessons in dealing with a tight (tyte?) schedule in '09-'10.

I also have to think that Obsidz learned a lot from its K2 experience. It was the first project for the studio, and K2 simply wasn't scoped as a project that was finishable in the time they were given. With a more manageable gameplan from the beginning (cut mini-games, don't waste time planning the droid planet, whack Disciple, etc.), they could've pulled it off.

KotOR 2 only had 13 months.

I know it's not a particularly forceful argument for comparing ME1 and ME2, but I suspect that ME2 has fewer options because characters aren't going to be wiped going into ME3, which will almost certainly come with a few new abilities per class, plus prestige class options.

Indeed. This bit bears repeating:

I think that it's more a case of trying to leverage the (larger) community of F3 fans already signed on over at Bethesda.

I literally just jumped out of my chair to go shut my office door so I could watch that.

I am becoming angry. I am scheduled to board a plane at Dulles Intl., destined for Maui (with a layover in SanFran), at 8:20AM this Saturday. Today, I read this:

There are a few (very few) planets where you'll be notified that there's something you might want to go and check out when you start scanning.

I've heard that the only way to hit level 30 on your first run is to import a level 60 character from ME1.

Why only 50K? That's not going to be enough to buy all the upgrades.

Damn.

I has a star: Also, if you're looking for easy-to-get-eezo, go to the cluster with the Migrant Fleet, and scan the other two star systems there. 1 small planet + 3 asteroids = nearly 20K eezo.

As a rule, game skills are generally balanced best on the "Normal" difficulty levels. Designers do a lot less playtesting as the difficulties increase. Insanity is going to give you a rather skewed view of how the skills and classes function.